I’m hoping against hope that the forces of “Good”:http://www.liverpoolfc.tv/ will defeat the legions of “Evil”:http://www.bbc.co.uk/bbcfour/documentaries/profile/abramovich.shtml in the semi-final of the FA Cup later on today (although “God himself”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robbie_Fowler is ineligible to play for Good, being cup-tied from an earlier round). Meanwhile, I laughed aloud at several passages of Simon Burnton’s meditations on “Djibril Cisse and the off-side rule”:http://football.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,,1758833,00.html .
Complete the following sentence.
bq. The dismissal of Ms. McCarthy provided fresh evidence of the Bush administration’s determination to (…) leaks of classified information.
a. abuse
b. manipulate
c. hypocritically punish others for
d. stanch
The correct answer here is a, b or c. Unless you’re David Johnston and Scott Shane of the _New York Times_. In which case, apparently, it’s “d”:http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/22/washington/22leak.html?ex=1303358400&en=96b99d312427aecb&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss.
Alex Voorhoeve (LSE) writes to tell me of a proposed law in the Netherlands which would establish a special legal status for young Dutch citizens of Caribbean descent, allowing them to be deported from the Netherlands back to their territory of origin for minor crimes. The people in question are Dutch citizens of as good a legal title as anyone else, but this appears to single them out on the basis of ethnic or racial criteria for treatment that would not be meted out to others. The details are in “this pdf”:http://www.nrc.nl/redactie/binnenland/BobWit.pdf , by a judge on the Caribbean Court of Justice (and formerly a judge in The Netherlands).